Hi gang I've just rented a dedicated matrix linux server (the guys, friends, who hosted my sites are not always reliable if the site goes down, because its a relationship based on friendship rather than business)... I'm on a steep learning curver and would very much appreciate any tutorials or advice. I'm particularly struggling with the primary dns of the server (it seems that once I get that set up I use the same dns for each domain I add to the server but its not a 100% clear) TIA Adam
Take a brief look at tinydns - http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-server.html It's a dns program that is a lot less cryptic than bind and safer as well (not that there's a lot of dns hacking happening). If you can compile programs on linux, then setup is a snap - even if you can't it's not that difficult, you just need to run some commands. To answer your question, your dns server will be able to handle dns duties for any number of sites - but make sure that you resolve any potential names to the right addresses - don't just put up a www entry - you want yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com ftp.yourdomain.com etc. all to be able to resolve to addresses. As far as running a server, there's a lot to know and I wouldn't know where to start. It really depends on how much linux knowledge you have. Check out safari.oreilly.com - it's an online library of books by oreilly publishing (big in the tech world) and a few other companies. You can sign up for a free 14 day trial, but my point is that Oreilly has some great books on server administration - a lot of them on specific subjects like firewalls, dns, etc. They are a little bit techy for a newbie, but they are great referrence material. Linux in a Nutshell (ISBN: 0-596-00482-6) is a good starting point, but there is probably a lot of info in there that you don't really need - like vi editor commands, gnome desktop stuff, etc.
Make sure you don't accept zone transfers from any unauthorized server (i.e. only trusted servers can transfer zone information to your server). If you have just one machine, it basically means that you don't trust anybody. Same applies to your machine performing zone transfers. Do not allow this (except to trusted servers). For example, if you launch nslookup on Windows (not all nslookup's implement this) and run c:> nslookup<Enter> ls domain.com. If your DNS server does zone transfers, it will list all records in domain.com - this is something hackers would like to receive. It saves them time (less scanning). Here's a good resource for checking how's your DNS server setup: http://www.dnsreport.com/ It will warn you of many questionable things in your DNS setup and explain the reasons. J.D.